Why don't he write?

The observant among you should be asking, “Where is my weekly link roundup?” That is a good question. The reality is I’m a bit written out.
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Home for a few days!

Here it is… 1131.  This was home for some of us for the past week.  I’m thankful for our good location, corners are always good!  Silas Partners was across from ADRA and next to Gospel For Asia. 

There were so many amazing organizations at NRB this year.  A few aisles down were some of our new co-workers.  This is Mary and Alexis from Trinet.  They were a lot of fun!

Weekly Link Roundup, Feb. 22

idealware on Basic Overviews: Three, count them three links for the price of one! An introduction to Tagging, RSS and Image Blocking are all right at your fingertips.

GigaOM on Google Office: Last night Google launched a premium version of the Google Apps product. We had been recommending this to some clients for their email needs. The good news for ministries is a free version will remain. I agree with Om’s analysis that this is a shot across the Microsoft Office bow.

Slashdot on SETI@home: The project finally found something, a stolen laptop!

The Press

This is Silas Man checking in for the day This morning went well. Unfortunately, the camera crew experienced some technical difficulties, I’m hoping to get a photo or 2 up by the end of today. It was great to interact with such great people at the press conference. There were a lot of questions about my role here at the conference.
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Day One – Hospitality ‘suite’ and the first educational session.

We got to the Orlando Convention Center pretty early to get to the hospitality suite, and for me to meet, in person finally, Todd Baker from Masterworks who I was co-presenting with at the first educational session. Like all convention centers, this one is pretty huge and even before we made it to the suite I was tired. Many other conventions going on at the same time. Some Tae Kwon Do thing, a “Magical Classic” (no idea what this is,) some Monster Truck thing, and a few thousand little Goth kids running around in Hall C at MegaCon (I think some online gamer/sci-fi/anime thing.)
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Link Roundup Feb. 8

ZANPT on Convio/GetActive: Convio and GetActive had a conference call yesterday. It looks like Open APIs may be in the future. This is great news for ministries. It appears they are moving to a world where clients can use any CMS (Content Management System) they want.

Fundraising Innovation on Integrated Marketing: A good look at what “Dual Channel Donors” mean to an organization. It is a report from Convio, so it is not shocking that groups who are managed with an eCRM (Electronic Constituent Relationship Management) fared better.

simplelog: New weblog software, sure they are a dime a dozen, but I’m only pointing out one. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m sure I’ll install it at some point and then never use it.

Ars Technica on Google Apps: Google Apps for your domain has been a big boon for smaller ministries and businesses. It has been free, but it appears it won’t be free for long. I would guess a reasonable fee with some sort of scaled down free version. Any other bets?

TechCrunch on Yahoo! Pipes: The name comes from Unix, so I’m sure you are all familiar A “pipe” is the “|” character. On the Unix or Linux or BSD command line you can link commands together with the pipe. It is basically like saying take the output of one command and use it as the input of the next command. What this new service from Yahoo! lets you do is to “pipe” data from RSS feeds around the web. It must be popular because I can’t log in and try it! Look for a full review and ideas on how ministries can use it sometime next week.

IMified - Use IM for work

IMified is a new service that launched earlier this month. It has the easiest signup process ever, just send an IM. Once you’ve done that you have an account and what can you do with that account? Right out of the box you can setup reminders, to-do’s and notes. All of this is done via IM with IMified prompting you for information.

However, the real power of this tool is when you mash it up with services that have Open APIs. I linked my IMified account with the Silas Partners Basecamp account, now I can create To-Do’s and messages right from IM without even logging in.

IMified links up with a number of services include Google Calendar, Wordpress, Blogger and Salesforce. The sky’s the limit with open APIs, so I’m hopeful that this service will only be getting more helpful.

Link Roundup, Feb 1

CivicSpace on Demand: Hosted open source CRM software. I found CiviCRM a few weeks back, but this Monday they launched a hosted solution. While we are big fans of open source here at Silas, I’m not quite sure the open source products in the CRM space are quite there yet. Most people still want someone they can yell at when it doesn’t work right. This is a promising move, and as always we have a weather eye on it.

Campaign Monitor on Offline Permission: I know many of you are headed to NRB in a few weeks. Campaign monitor comes through with a great suggestion about how to be within the law as you collect email addresses the old fashion way, by hand. And remember explicit permission means having people drop cards into a fishbowl to win something and then signing them up for newsletters is a no-no.

Molly Holzshlag on IE: Molly Holzshlag has been the head of WaSP the members of which are rather militant in their laments on Internet Explorer. The fact that she is going over to work with Microsoft is a good thing all around. Hopefully with a web standards person on the inside IE will move in a direction that doesn’t require web designers and developers to build two versions of every site.

Pew on Tagging: The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a great source for more scholarly research on Internet trends. This reporting on tagging is especially interesting since many ministries are starting to ask us about “the wisdom of crowds.”

Link Roundup, January 25

c|net on Generation We: A short article about how the people of tomorrow are growing up. If you thought “young people” today, meaning people like me in their 20s and early 30s were media and marketing savvy - you ain’t seen nothing net. It’s time to get authentic.

Convio on Nonprofit Benchmarks: Registration is required to download these 17 page PDF, but it is interesting. The report looks at a number of vertical markets including the Christian market. The short version is that compared to other vertical markets, like Environmental or Health, the Christian market has better metrics almost across the board.

Weekly Link Roundup, January 18

Copy Blogger on Cornerstone Content: As Silas Partners has been working with a number of clients, we have advocated the creation of cornerstone or guidepost or flagship content. Regardless of what you call it, this content can define ministries and can define how search engines see your site.

NeoSmart Files on Tag Standards: Tagging is all the rage in the Web 2.0 crowd, but there is no standard around how you deal with spaces in tags or which part of speech you use to tag.

Kevin 0′Keefe on Competitor’s Blogs (via ProBlogger): In the ministry world a competitor is an interesting concept. Certainly similar organizations compete for giving dollars. This is written from a law blog perspective, but brings out what I would say are great, and valid points.